Adam & Eve to be blamed, or god!

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Well, before they sinned, there was no need to reproduce. They were immortal and had no need of a savior. It is only after they sin that God gives the curse of pains in child bearing

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Hangdawg,
Are you stating this literally or just explaining the text?Have you considered the naturalist viewpoint? Homo Sapiens developing simple technology and speech trying to understand the sometimes frightening world around them with the new found ability to create concepts. The concepts of spirits or forces in nature evolving into the concepts of gods.With the developement of agriculture and settled way of life not every one had to produce food and their arose a ruling class, soldiers and priests. The difference between the religions that are now dead or followed in other parts of the world is that Constantine adopted Christianity and the Holy Roman empire enforced it on Europe for hundreds of years and culturally indoctrinated europeans with Christianity.God is a concept that humans created. I'm not asserting here that God does or doesn't exist, but the books of the bible are stories made by humans to explain their world. Creation myths are common to most cultures, stories of how we came to be. Today science is using a different method to explore what the universe is and how it functions. Science doesn't have stories of dramatic clashes of personality. It uses mathematics which is not as exciting and much harder to understand. I'll admit finding the math tedious and am happy to let others crunch the numbers.All religions were created by people. But it's very common that people attribute these stores, thoughts, ideas to God, claiming either that they were inspired, or even that material was revealed.
Joseph Smith claimed the Book of Mormon was revealed.Looking at these books including the bible it is very clear these are human created. Dondan in another thread thought to prove the divine origin of the Koran by saying we couldn't write one tenth of it. Because of where he lives he is encultured to view the Koran as divine. Europeans are often encultered to think the bible is divine.But sometime read it as a book written by humans giving their struggles to make sense of themselves in the cosmos. It's an approximation of understanding.Look at the animal world there you will find animals laying eggs and mammals nurturing their offspring in a uterus until it's time to give birth. The apes give birth and humans give birth. It is labor. The priests came up with a story to explain that. And they weren't right but then how were they to know? And they attempted to control people with guilt so they could use that to demonstrate that people needed to obey them because people had messed up so much from being disobedient. What I'm saying makes sense and doesn't require believing things that are contradictory and implausible to the point of impossibility.Sometime look impartially at the discoveries and the concepts that science in the last say 400 years has developed to explain the things we've learned. These theories were developed to fit the evidence. Then look at the creation myth's of various peoples, look at the different religions and how people thought about themselves and the world 2000 years ago. A lot has changed. Science doesn't have the dramatic stories that so appeal to our attention and that makes it less appealing in many ways. But it has a consistency that is very appealing. It does contradict the old way of thinking in this culture and many people are unwilling to relinguish the old instituions and old emotionally secure way of believing. The differences between these paradigns is the substance of the debate here at evcforum.Past my bedtime now,
lfen

Jar,Googling has failed me or more likely my memory. Can't find the quotes I want so will have to paraphrase.I was looking for what I recall as a quote from a zen teacher that went something like this. "Only cease to make distinctions. A hairsbreadth of difference and the ten thousand things appear and you are caught in good and evil."What is "evil" about KBE is the you've got there through dualistic thought which now obscures the non dual "truth" of real nature, yours, god's, the universe. From a non dual viewpoint the KGE story tells of the birth of dualistic consciousness, samsara, and suffering. But the typical priests understanding of that in those times and in that part of the world seems to follow a literal belief in language and thus create many paradoxes.One of the main streams of western religious thought (I'm being careful here not to make sweaping statemeents) takes words to be literal truth and will assert the truth of dualism. This naive position leads to self contradiction such as omniscience vs. omnipotence. If you think in circles slowly enough you might miss the contradiction. Huang Po, http://hjem.get2net.dk/civet-cat/zen-writings/huang-po.htmI've read a little of Meister Eckert and the books of Bernadette Roberts, both christian contemplatives. It seems infrequent but some christians do awake and know the non dual.lfen

My reference is not to two gods but to the dualism of subject/object, the consciuosness of a subject separate from everyone, everything else which is an object for the ego or self subject.I am saying that the fall in Genesis ascribed to the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, could be interpreted as a story of the arising of the dualistic subject/object consciosness and the feeling of sin as a separation from god comes about with the arising of a feeling of an ego as a separate entity. I am not claiming that the redactor who wrote Genesis held that notion. I know very little about jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah but as far as the text of the Torah goes I don't see any evidence that the writers were aware of non dualistic consciousness.Pantheism is one approach to non duality. Buddhism is another, Advaita Vedanta still another and there are a very few christian non dualists in the contemplative traditions of catholicism. I am very impressed with Bernadette Roberts' book, THE EXPERIENCE OF NO SELF.I was raised in the Episcopal church so I've a lay understanding of Christianity.lfen

I think all scriptures were conceived and written by people. There is a class of scriptures that the people claim to have received accurate information from the source of the universe. These sorts of claims can be found today. I catagorical believe that the source of the universe has not communicated directly in language. I will cite Korzbyski and Wittgenstein to point to the limits of language to expess "truth" and "reality".So, yes the kinder gentler aspect of Buddhism does appeal to me. I think that partially is a consequence of the Buddha's refusal to comment on the source of universe. He did seem to have a very modern understanding of the limits of language and that is something I like about Taoism and Buddhism.Much of the problem I see with near eastern religions that are book based is that they don't factor in the limitations of language and so are left with inevitable contradictions that arise from the nature of a symbolic system for mapping the universe.Language is a powerful tool but it has limitations.Buddhism has a semantic sophistication that I find lacking in revealed religion. To get back to the thread topic. (I am interested in your topics but I think if we are to talk about them you would need to start a new thead.) The question of Adam and Eve and the human sense of sin is something that non dual thought addresses in a very different way. I just wanted to show an alternative to assigning blame. I wanted to give the view point that the knowledge of good and evil requires a state or better is a state that produces suffering. That is that it's not a punishment like a jail sentence it's just that in the buddhist understanding the sense of separation is suffering. The buddhist understanding and solution is very different from the near eastern approach though.lfen